Time to switch? [LWN.net]

Time to switch?

Posted Jan 3, 2003 17:02 UTC (Fri) by ssavitzky (subscriber, #2855)
Parent article: Distribution support: how long is long enough?

I've been using RedHat for a long time now, but this may very well be the year I switch. For a long time now, RH has been drifting farther and farther away from a "traditional" Unix that you administer by editing text files, to one that's practically impossible to administer without their GUI tools. Meanwhile, the man pages are getting less and less relevant, because RH doesn't update them according to their configuration changes.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who only reboots a system when there's a power failure or an absolutely necessary hardware upgrade -- my home network still has a news/mail/dialup server running RH5.1, and the file and web servers are 6.2. Upgrades would be painful, to say the least: the structure of /var/spool/mail changed in major ways between 5 and 6, and programs I rely on, like diald and newsx keep getting dropped. The thing that finally drove me over the edge was the discovery that frm, which is part of Elm, got dropped going to 8.0. I was using that!

My typical time between reboots is six months to a year -- heck; at work I've had login sessions lasting 9 months. There's very little point in installing a distro that's not going to have patches available over what I've come to consider its useful life.

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